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Speed limits don't make sense tbh. They should notify drivers of the design speed for a section of the road, but it shouldn't be treated as a hard limit. Whethe

Speed limits don't make sense tbh. They should notify drivers of the design speed for a section of the road, but it shouldn't be treated as a hard limit. Whether a driver is a danger to others or not is a subjective call, we should let police officers make that call, without defining strict criteria. Sometimes a car going at 110 in a 100 is perfectly safe, and another going 50 is extremely dangerous.

SparkyMcUnicorn 4y ago
For someone doing 50 in a 100mph zone in the US, you can get a ticket for that currently. In most states the minimum speed limit is usually between 10-15mph under, unless otherwise posted.
atoav 4y ago
I live in Germany and regularly travel to neighbouring countries by car. The lack of speed limits on some sections of the German Autobahn makes traveling through that country seriously exhausting. While you just keep on keeping on on non-German highways driving on a German Autobahn section without tempo limit can feel like entering a war. The typical makeup of a three-lane section of German Autobahn is: - Right: trucks, very slow vehicles - Middle: people who go at reasonable speeds (~130 to 160 km/h depending on the terrain) - Left: people who disregard the physics of air resistance and blast without limits This is the ideal, but not what you will encounter on the road. Whenever a truck overtakes another you have to beeak down or use the leftmost lane and make sure the cars that approach from behind with a potential delta of 100+ km/h don't crush you to death. Generally this leads to many stressful and dangerous situations. Speed limits make sense because they make driving safer by deceeasing the possible speed delta between vehicles who share a road.
- gggggg5 4y ago
  >Left: people who disregard the physics of air resistance and blast without limits Left: some guy in a X5 driving steady 150km/h, not reacting to getting flashed and immediately accelerating if you try to pass on the right. Somehow, as soon as you get out of Germany this stops happening. In France and Benelux you get to comfortably cruise at 250km/h and everyone just moves out of the way. German autobahns are not exhausting because of the lack of speed limits, they're exhausting because of the Germans.
  - aeno 4y ago
    Are you trolling? Where in France are you allowed to go 250km/h?
    - gggggg5 4y ago
      >Are you trolling? No? > Where in France are you allowed to go 250km/h? Nowhere, but like most EU countries there is nothing stopping you from going 250km/h. It's extremely unlikely that you'll encounter cops who'd bother to chase you, especially while using Waze and the likes. Besides, how often do you see German registered cars driving the speed limit in France? Foreign registered cars are pretty much always speeding.
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - gggggg5 4y ago
      >Sure, do that. The cops won't chase you, they'll just be waiting for you at the toll booth. I'm sure Waze will get you out of it. Never once happened to me having driven hundreds of thousands of kilometers through these countries, but YMMV. We usually wear matching hoodies on any longer trips to combat driver identification anyway. If the cops actually make an effort, you just perform some acrobatics inside the car so they won't be able to tell which of the passengers was driving. > know that getting caught once is a 1500€ fine and your car seized Can't seize a car the driver doesn't own. Unless you mean impounding it and requiring you to pay some small release fee? >Needless to say, we don't need drivers like you on our roads, and I dearly hope you do crash at that speed and permanently rid us of you. Unnecessarily harsh. I reckon it'd be better for everybody if I didn't crash at that speed.
      - ohgodplsno 4y ago
        >Unnecessarily harsh. I reckon it'd be better for everybody if I didn't crash at that speed. No. You are not a professional driver, or even a good driver, because a good driver would recognize that the proper place to do 250 is on a race track. You make the road dangerous both for you, but even more so for other drivers and will, one day, kill someone. So, please, kindly fuck off of french roads, whether it is through crossing the border and letting it be someone else's problem, or eating a tree like half of the dumbasses driving polish rental Audis.
throwaway777845 4y ago
very unsafe situation when 50% drive 100 and the rest are doing 50. somebody has to adjust. speed fans usually are not the ones to compromise, so everybody drives around 100. people get used to 100, some groups starts pushing for 110, and this keeps up based on safety feeling of speed lovers.
atq2119 4y ago
Vague criteria are a recipe for abuse by corrupt cops and a feeding ground for lawyers. I'm all for looking at individual cases, but where possible, strict and simple rules that everybody can understand are best. This applies to traffic rules as much as it does to tax law and other things.
brenns10 4y ago
Leaving hazy judgement calls up to the police for enforcement, at least in the US, has not fared particularly well for non-white people. See, for example, the history of enforcement of "jaywalking", a "crime" which was recently decriminalized in California for precisely that reason. So I wouldn't advocate for a system where we just "let police officers make that call" regarding whether a driver is going at a safe speed. At least not in the US. And "design speed" may be an interesting or useful thing to think about for roads that are far away from houses or business, like highways. But if you're near those things then it suddenly matters a lot less whether the speed is safe for the driver, and a lot more whether it's safe for the other important road users: pedestrians and bicyclists/other micro-mobility users. In those cases, speed limits absolutely make sense. And bizarrely, at least in the bay area, it seems like those are areas where speed enforcement (and other traffic enforcement) are practically non-existent. So I have to disagree. I know you're talking about highways, but even there I'd rather have something closer to an objective standard being enforced, rather than the simple will of the police.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  > ...has not fared particularly well for non-white people... I (old white male) have not yet had problems. But certainly I know white people who have - best-guess because they were young, or female, or "looked too rich or too poor" for the area in which they were driving. And from second-hand accounts, a fair number of police officers have "law unto themselves" pet theories about what sorts of people they should target for tough enforcement, or let off with a warning.
  - brenns10 4y ago
    True, I didn't mean to imply that race was the only factor for unfair enforcement. Just one well-documented example. All the more reason not to add more subjective criteria for enforcement.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  > Leaving hazy judgement calls up to the police for enforcement, at least in the US, has not fared particularly well for non-white people. See, for example, the history of enforcement of "jaywalking", a "crime" which was recently decriminalized in California for precisely that reason You will notice that this wasn't solved by setting up enforcement cameras on every street that ticket all jaywalkers equally.

SparkyMcUnicorn 4y ago

For someone doing 50 in a 100mph zone in the US, you can get a ticket for that currently. In most states the minimum speed limit is usually between 10-15mph under, unless otherwise posted.

atoav 4y ago

I live in Germany and regularly travel to neighbouring countries by car. The lack of speed limits on some sections of the German Autobahn makes traveling through that country seriously exhausting. While you just keep on keeping on on non-German highways driving on a German Autobahn section without tempo limit can feel like entering a war. The typical makeup of a three-lane section of German Autobahn is: - Right: trucks, very slow vehicles - Middle: people who go at reasonable speeds (~130 to 160 km/h depending on the terrain) - Left: people who disregard the physics of air resistance and blast without limits This is the ideal, but not what you will encounter on the road. Whenever a truck overtakes another you have to beeak down or use the leftmost lane and make sure the cars that approach from behind with a potential delta of 100+ km/h don't crush you to death. Generally this leads to many stressful and dangerous situations. Speed limits make sense because they make driving safer by deceeasing the possible speed delta between vehicles who share a road.

gggggg5 4y ago
>Left: people who disregard the physics of air resistance and blast without limits Left: some guy in a X5 driving steady 150km/h, not reacting to getting flashed and immediately accelerating if you try to pass on the right. Somehow, as soon as you get out of Germany this stops happening. In France and Benelux you get to comfortably cruise at 250km/h and everyone just moves out of the way. German autobahns are not exhausting because of the lack of speed limits, they're exhausting because of the Germans.
- aeno 4y ago
  Are you trolling? Where in France are you allowed to go 250km/h?
  - gggggg5 4y ago
    >Are you trolling? No? > Where in France are you allowed to go 250km/h? Nowhere, but like most EU countries there is nothing stopping you from going 250km/h. It's extremely unlikely that you'll encounter cops who'd bother to chase you, especially while using Waze and the likes. Besides, how often do you see German registered cars driving the speed limit in France? Foreign registered cars are pretty much always speeding.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - gggggg5 4y ago
    >Sure, do that. The cops won't chase you, they'll just be waiting for you at the toll booth. I'm sure Waze will get you out of it. Never once happened to me having driven hundreds of thousands of kilometers through these countries, but YMMV. We usually wear matching hoodies on any longer trips to combat driver identification anyway. If the cops actually make an effort, you just perform some acrobatics inside the car so they won't be able to tell which of the passengers was driving. > know that getting caught once is a 1500€ fine and your car seized Can't seize a car the driver doesn't own. Unless you mean impounding it and requiring you to pay some small release fee? >Needless to say, we don't need drivers like you on our roads, and I dearly hope you do crash at that speed and permanently rid us of you. Unnecessarily harsh. I reckon it'd be better for everybody if I didn't crash at that speed.
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      >Unnecessarily harsh. I reckon it'd be better for everybody if I didn't crash at that speed. No. You are not a professional driver, or even a good driver, because a good driver would recognize that the proper place to do 250 is on a race track. You make the road dangerous both for you, but even more so for other drivers and will, one day, kill someone. So, please, kindly fuck off of french roads, whether it is through crossing the border and letting it be someone else's problem, or eating a tree like half of the dumbasses driving polish rental Audis.

throwaway777845 4y ago

very unsafe situation when 50% drive 100 and the rest are doing 50. somebody has to adjust. speed fans usually are not the ones to compromise, so everybody drives around 100. people get used to 100, some groups starts pushing for 110, and this keeps up based on safety feeling of speed lovers.

atq2119 4y ago

Vague criteria are a recipe for abuse by corrupt cops and a feeding ground for lawyers. I'm all for looking at individual cases, but where possible, strict and simple rules that everybody can understand are best. This applies to traffic rules as much as it does to tax law and other things.

brenns10 4y ago

Leaving hazy judgement calls up to the police for enforcement, at least in the US, has not fared particularly well for non-white people. See, for example, the history of enforcement of "jaywalking", a "crime" which was recently decriminalized in California for precisely that reason. So I wouldn't advocate for a system where we just "let police officers make that call" regarding whether a driver is going at a safe speed. At least not in the US. And "design speed" may be an interesting or useful thing to think about for roads that are far away from houses or business, like highways. But if you're near those things then it suddenly matters a lot less whether the speed is safe for the driver, and a lot more whether it's safe for the other important road users: pedestrians and bicyclists/other micro-mobility users. In those cases, speed limits absolutely make sense. And bizarrely, at least in the bay area, it seems like those are areas where speed enforcement (and other traffic enforcement) are practically non-existent. So I have to disagree. I know you're talking about highways, but even there I'd rather have something closer to an objective standard being enforced, rather than the simple will of the police.

bell-cot 4y ago
> ...has not fared particularly well for non-white people... I (old white male) have not yet had problems. But certainly I know white people who have - best-guess because they were young, or female, or "looked too rich or too poor" for the area in which they were driving. And from second-hand accounts, a fair number of police officers have "law unto themselves" pet theories about what sorts of people they should target for tough enforcement, or let off with a warning.
- brenns10 4y ago
  True, I didn't mean to imply that race was the only factor for unfair enforcement. Just one well-documented example. All the more reason not to add more subjective criteria for enforcement.
bluefirebrand 4y ago
> Leaving hazy judgement calls up to the police for enforcement, at least in the US, has not fared particularly well for non-white people. See, for example, the history of enforcement of "jaywalking", a "crime" which was recently decriminalized in California for precisely that reason You will notice that this wasn't solved by setting up enforcement cameras on every street that ticket all jaywalkers equally.